Irish Coast Airline Pilot Sightings (2018)

On the morning of Friday 9 November 2018, several commercial flights over the southwest of Ireland radioed air traffic control about bright objects moving at high speed at high altitude. The exchanges, later published as audio, were picked up by newspapers and broadcasters in Ireland, the UK and the United States. The reports are documented, but no explanation has been officially confirmed.

The reports

The first call came from a British Airways flight, BA94, travelling from Montreal toward London Heathrow. Around 6:47 a.m., the crew asked Shannon air traffic control whether military exercises were under way off the west coast. Controllers said there were none, and that "There is nothing showing on either primary or secondary [radar]." The pilot said the object "came up on our left-hand side and then rapidly veered to the north," describing it as "a very bright light that disappeared at very high speed" (TIME).

Other crews reported similar objects, and a third pilot joined the exchange with the words "Glad it wasn't just me" (TIME). A Virgin flight described "multiple objects following the same sort of trajectory – very bright from where we were," and said two bright lights seemed to "bank over to the right and climb away at speed" (TIME). A Norwegian Air 737 flying from New York to Shannon was also part of the exchange, and according to the Irish Examiner one pilot called the speed "astronomical," roughly twice the speed of sound. The Examiner places the Virgin and Norwegian flights in high-level airspace above 24,500 feet.

Official response

The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) confirmed that it had received reports "from a small number of aircraft on Friday, November 9, of unusual air activity," and that it had filed a report. It said the matter "will be investigated under the normal confidential occurrence investigation process" (Irish Examiner). A spokesman told TIME the process would involve speaking to all the pilots involved (TIME). Flying magazine reported the investigation without any findings, and none of the sources read for this entry publish conclusions from the review.

Explanations and the open question

The most common explanation was a natural fireball. Aviation journalist Gerry Byrne told the Irish Examiner that "In all probability they were meteorites," noting that meteors can enter at a low angle. Euronews quoted the sceptical UFO researcher Chris Lowe as saying "In all probability, it is a meteor or other bits of space junk re-entering the Earth's atmosphere," but he flagged one detail as unusual: a pilot reported the objects veering away, while a meteor would normally keep its path. The Virgin pilot had also suggested a meteor or a re-entering object. Lowe went further, telling Euronews that reports of discs and triangles that "defy current technological ability and the laws of physics" had risen over the previous couple of years, often from witnesses such as military and civil pilots, and he argued that the Irish case should be read against that background. His view is one side of a debate, not a finding of the review.

The fireball reading fits the brightness, the speed, and the multiple lights reported by several crews at once. It does not fully account for the reported turns, and it has not been confirmed by a published investigation. The IAA's own statement described reports from "a small number of aircraft," which is a smaller witness pool than the number of calls might suggest. The radar result is also limited: a negative primary and secondary return rules out a conventionally detected aircraft or balloon in that sector, but it does not identify the lights that the crews saw.

Assessment

The event is well recorded in contemporaneous sources: it involves several crews, a published air traffic control exchange, and an official acknowledgment by the national aviation regulator. It is listed as contested because the identity of the objects remains unexplained and the investigation's findings were not published in the sources reviewed. Readers should weigh the meteor explanation and the unexplained turns side by side rather than treating either as settled.